July-18th-2020, 05:38 AM
(This post was last modified: July-18th-2020, 05:54 AM by Armin@netPI.)
I intensified my tests with Tosibox "Lock for Container" product on a netPI RTE 3 along with a Siemens S7-1200 PLC.
First I configured netPI to join a Wifi network as a client to get connected to an internet router. This creates the route how the deployed Tosibox container connects to the central Tosibox internet remote server.
Using Wifi made me "free" during my tests to configure any static IP address on either netPI's single or the dual Industrial Ethernet ports to let it match the IP subnet my S7-1200 PLC was previously configured to while in parallel netPI has internet access.
My PLC had an IP address of 10.11.5.253. To let Tosibox container reach this IP address respectively a whole IP range and route it fine I had to configure an additional routing path for the network 10.11.0.0 with subnet mask 255.255.0.0. This is all I had to do.
Then I was doing the usual Tosibox internet pairing/matching procedure between the netPI as Tosibox server and my maintenance notebook hosting the Tosibox client software and I was able to ping the PLC immediately after the remote tunnel connection was established clicking "connect" in the client software.
After that I started my Siemens Engineering software TIA portal on my notebook and prepared a simple PLC program to be downloaded to the PLC. Since the Tosibox connection was already established well I was using exactly the 10.11.5.253 IP address during my TIA network configuration and continue as if the remote PLC was connected to my notebook locally.
There is a feature in TIA software that is called "Update accessible devices" that is able to scan your computer's onboard ethernet interfaces for PLCs. This is a feature that Tosibox product "Lock for Container" does not support to tunnel since Ethernet multicast and unicast mechanism and telegrams are used here. So don't be astonished that this doesn't work here.
So when TIA asks for the target device during your "going online" click do the following like the picture illustrates:
Select "Show devices with the same addresses" and then click "Start search". Instead of using the usual boardcast Ethernet messages now TIA is directly addressing the PLC over the configured IP address and hence it gets it scanned. After clicking "GoOnline" I was able to get connected to the PLC over the Tosibox tunnel. Here is a screen shot I made of reading PLC values from the inner program logic:
So it is proven Tosibox can be used to remote access Siemens S7 PLC from anywhere in the world using netPI.
First I configured netPI to join a Wifi network as a client to get connected to an internet router. This creates the route how the deployed Tosibox container connects to the central Tosibox internet remote server.
Using Wifi made me "free" during my tests to configure any static IP address on either netPI's single or the dual Industrial Ethernet ports to let it match the IP subnet my S7-1200 PLC was previously configured to while in parallel netPI has internet access.
My PLC had an IP address of 10.11.5.253. To let Tosibox container reach this IP address respectively a whole IP range and route it fine I had to configure an additional routing path for the network 10.11.0.0 with subnet mask 255.255.0.0. This is all I had to do.
Then I was doing the usual Tosibox internet pairing/matching procedure between the netPI as Tosibox server and my maintenance notebook hosting the Tosibox client software and I was able to ping the PLC immediately after the remote tunnel connection was established clicking "connect" in the client software.
After that I started my Siemens Engineering software TIA portal on my notebook and prepared a simple PLC program to be downloaded to the PLC. Since the Tosibox connection was already established well I was using exactly the 10.11.5.253 IP address during my TIA network configuration and continue as if the remote PLC was connected to my notebook locally.
There is a feature in TIA software that is called "Update accessible devices" that is able to scan your computer's onboard ethernet interfaces for PLCs. This is a feature that Tosibox product "Lock for Container" does not support to tunnel since Ethernet multicast and unicast mechanism and telegrams are used here. So don't be astonished that this doesn't work here.
So when TIA asks for the target device during your "going online" click do the following like the picture illustrates:
Select "Show devices with the same addresses" and then click "Start search". Instead of using the usual boardcast Ethernet messages now TIA is directly addressing the PLC over the configured IP address and hence it gets it scanned. After clicking "GoOnline" I was able to get connected to the PLC over the Tosibox tunnel. Here is a screen shot I made of reading PLC values from the inner program logic:
So it is proven Tosibox can be used to remote access Siemens S7 PLC from anywhere in the world using netPI.
„You never fail until you stop trying.“, Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
